COVID-19 has disproportionally impacted older adults, and has highlighted many issues, including extreme deficiencies in Canadian long-term care homes and gaps in home and community care services for older adults. In recent years, there has been a push towards better patient and family engagement in health system research, and with the onset of the pandemic, engaging older adults in research and policy planning is more important than ever. In this article, we describe the Seniors Helping as Research Partners (SHARP) approach to engagement with older adults as an example of how partnerships that engage older adults in the development of research aims and processes can help to ensure that future research meets the needs of older adults. SHARP members highlighted a number of areas for future COVID-19 research such as improvements to long-term care, enhancing access to home and community care, and a focus on aging and social isolation.

The liquidity premium on corporate bonds has been high on the agenda of Solvency regulators owing to its potential relationship to an additional discount factor on long-dated insurance liabilities. We analyse components of the credit spread as a function of standard bond characteristics during 2003–2014 on a daily basis by regression analyses, after introducing a new liquidity proxy. We derive daily distributions of illiquidity contributions to the credit spread at the individual bond level and find that liquidity premia were close to zero just before the financial crisis. We observe the time-varying nature of liquidity premia as well as a widening in the daily distribution in the years after the credit crunch. We find evidence to support higher liquidity premia, on average, on bonds of lower credit quality. The evolution of model parameters is economically intuitive and brings additional insight into investors’ behaviour. The frequent and bond-level estimation of liquidity premia, combined with few data restrictions makes the approach suitable for ALM modelling, especially when future work is directed towards arriving at forward-looking estimates at both the aggregate and bond-specific level.

Late Pleistocene large mammal extinctions in North America have been attributed to a number of factors or combination of factors, primarily climate change and human hunting, but the relative roles of these factors remain much debated. Clo-vis-period hunters exploited species such as mammoth, but many now extinct species such as camels were seemingly not hunted. Archaeological evidence from the Wally’s Beach site in southern Canada, including stone tools and butchered bone, provide the first evidence that Clovis people hunted North American camels. Archaeologists generally dismiss human hunting as a significant contributor to Pleistocene extinctions in North America, but Wally’s Beach demonstrates that human hunting was more inclusive than assumed and we must continue to consider hunting as a factor in Pleistocene extinctions.

Positive results were obtained from protein residue analysis on three Clovis points from Wally's Beach, southwestern Alberta. Two tested positive for Equus, the third for a bovid, probably Bison or Bootherium. All genera are present in the site remains. This finding clearly demonstrates use of Equus by Clovis hunters. Four 14C dates indicate that the site was in use between 11,000 and 11,300 B.P.

Insects are usually classified as either freeze-intolerant or freeze-tolerant (Danks 1978; Sømme 1982; Baust and Rojas 1985). Freeze-intolerant species cannot survive the formation of ice in their bodies and typically lower their supercooling points (SCP), the temperature of spontaneous ice formation, during the winter months (Sømme 1982). This is the lower lethal temperature for the insect, although prolonged exposure to temperatures above this may be harmful (Turnock et al. 1983). On the other hand, freeze-tolerant insects can survive the presence of ice crystals in their extracellular fluid and usually have nucleators that prevent supercooling below – 10°C (Zachariassen 1982).

The true armyworm, Pseudaletia unipuncta (Haw.), has no evident diapausing stage, is not freeze tolerant, shows no consistent seasonal changes in either supercooling-point values or longevity at 0 °C for different developmental stages, and did not survive when held in overwintering cages in the field. These facts support the hypothesis that this species cannot overwinter in Quebec and that the adult populations observed each spring must therefore be the result of a northerly migration from sites, such as Tennessee, where overwintering is known to occur.